Things that bug me.

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

...and maybe you can add your own pet peefs:

 

Pet peeves? We've had a couple of those threads. Here's what I wrote in them:

 

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People who walk 2-3 abreast down a sidewalk, and refuse to move over to make room for you as you try to squeeze past them going in the opposite direction. A friend of mine, walking solo, once refused to yield to such a group; there was a shoulder-to-shoulder collision with the leftmost member of the oncoming group, and that individual had the gall to get angry at my friend.

 

People who pee on the seats in public rest rooms. Do they do this at home too?

 

The bastard squirrels that are stealing corn from my garden. I've been busting my greenthumbs to produce a bountiful harvest, and these interlopers come in at the last minute and steal the fruits (vegetables?) of my labor. Makes me not feel so bad when I see 'em flattened on the road.

 

Dried-out Filet-o-Fish sandwiches. You want to turn to the nitwit who serves it to you and say "would you serve this to your family?"

 

Frost-heaved garage foundations. Especially when the previous owner doesn't disclose it.

 

BMWST.com server downtime, and the resulting delirium tremens.

 

People who don't respond to social cues. A guy at work tries to impress people with his burps and farts and general adolescent conversation, and doesn't seem to understand that no one likes it.

 

Dirty dishes (I don't have a dishwasher). I just want to throw them all away and buy clean ones.

 

The free (unwanted) newspapers and flyers that get tossed on my driveway or rubber-banded to my fence I get tired of picking them up when I'm home, and I don't care for the "I'M NOT HOME" hint that they present when I'm not there to pick them up.

 

Entropy. (Actually, a lot of the above peeves fall under this category.)

 

Junk science.

 

Diseases of affluence. I guess obesity is the big one here. To clarify: fat people aren't my pet peeve; just the fact that people (myself included) can and do get fat, and the culture that supports it.

 

Misguided certitude. Politics, religion, even a debate over the best bike out there. A lot depends on one's personal value system; a refusal to acknowledge that someone else may have different values leads readily to misguided certitude. In non-subjective matters, real science is frequently uncertain (e.g. global warming, link between silicone breast implants and illness, etc.), yet people will treat it as gospel. No joke, death and taxes are about all you can be sure of; on anything else, there's room for doubt.

 

Ketchup packets that are sticky on the outside. Is that gross, or what?

 

Intermittent failures.

 

Commercial pilots who think they're flying a fighter plane. Maybe it has to do with being a control freak, but I get real nervous when the plane does very sudden things, especially when we have no idea for the reason behind it. I wouldn't mind riding in the flight engineer's seat when the pilot stands the plane on its wing or firewalls the throttles - that'd be fun - but when I'm sitting back in "sardine class" and it happens, I sometimes worry that we're dodging another plane or something. Scariest moment for me was a Sun Country/MLT flight out of DTW; steep climb after takeoff, suddenly the pilot pushed the stick forward and got us somewhere close to zero g's for literally two or three seconds. As explained, any sudden maneuver is unsettling, but the sustained ~zero g's brought that "AAAAAH I'M FALLING" instinct into it, and I really felt like we were about to die. OTOH, I've been on flights where you barely knew any maneuver was taking place, it was all so smooth, and you wanted to just go up and shake the pilot's hand and say "well done, sir;" you figure he had to be a limousine driver in a previous life.

 

The heredity of belief.

 

The 120-Hz buzz of fluorescent lights (and various other electronic devices).

 

"Best Effort" contracts.

 

The narrow thread of my experience in this universe. I'm annoyed at how much there is to see and do and understand and be in this world, and the fact that we can only experience an infinitesimal amount of it before we take the big dirt nap.

 

The S.O.B.'s who try to get on the elevator/bus/subway before occupants manage to make their escape. When I'm on the outside, if the door opens and someone's waiting to get out, I stand clear to the side of the doorway until they'r eout. When I'm on the inside, sometimes I want put my arms out sideways and just walk straight out of the 'vator immediately after the door opens, no matter who's standing out there. Get out of the way, ya ninnies! It's called elevator etiquette; check for course listings at your local community college.

 

The way old ice cream turns to chewing gum in your freezer.

 

The way frozen vegetables turn into freezer-burned snowballs.

 

Clutter. It builds up in my workspace until (about once a month) I say "DAMMIT" and spend five hours cleaning house.

 

Cold car seats in the wintertime. You're already cold just being out there, then you sit down on this icy brick of a seat and stay there for the duration of your drive.

 

10-cent bottle deposit in Michigan. It may have cleaned up the roadsides, but that's because everyone has to store empty bottles and cans in their house until they have enough to warrant a trip to the store to turn them all in. In the intervening month, the last millimeter of beer or pop in each vessel has cultivated its own little colony of fungus and mold; some of them have developed rudimentary intelligence by this point. You bring them to the can/bottle return area at the store, which smells like rotten beer/pop because everyone else has been upending cans and bottles there all day, and you put them into this beverage-encrusted machine that smells worst of all. When all's said and done, you get maybe two or three bucks back, depending on how much of an alcoholic or caffeine addict you are, and all you really want to do is go home and scrub yourself in the shower for 45 minutes. It's a disgusting experience that makes you seriously consider just throwing away all your bottles and cans from then on, screw the refund.

 

Hangovers.

 

Hangnails.

 

Christmas shopping. Actually the shopping isn't that bad if I know what I'm after. It's the matter of trying to figure out what to get people. Women seem to be a whole lot better at this. I lament the compulsion/pressure to get people something even when it's superfluous.

 

Office politics. The previously mentioned colleague, who works hard to impress most of us with his burps, farts, and general adolescent conduct, also works very hard to curry favor with our manager; it's pretty repulsive.

 

Lame input devices. As hi-tech and fast as computers have become, the keyboard is inherited from the lowly typewriter, invented in the 1800's. People have tweaked and twiddled with it a little bit, and occasionally there's a major change - I've tried a few oddball keyboards at work for a while, then gave up - but nobody's come up with anything good that lets me put words on the screen as fast as I think them. Speech recognition? Bah. It's crap. Haven't seen good SR software yet, and if SR did become a popular input technique, offices would become very noisy places. Carpal tunnels are becoming inflamed all over the country right now. Something needs to be done.

 

Punishments that don't fit the crime.

 

The make-believe programs that the Discovery Channel is airing lately. They used to have great documentaries about amazing, real things, and then someone decided reality just wasn't eye-catching enough. Now we get CGI dinosaurs in a CGI diorama along with narration, as if we're watching a couple of real tigers stalking deer in the sundarbans. Or we get totally imaginary CGI creatures, the fantasized results of millenia of evolution, things with names like "swampus" and whatnot. Last week I saw (the first few minutes of) a show about the feasibility of a submerged, floating rail tunnel from New York to London in which trains would zoom along at several thousand miles per hour, all to be built at a cost of trillions of dollars over the course of decades. Whatever. Pretty soon they can change their name to "the Make-Believe Channel."

 

The sensationalism of local news coverage, especially in the detail-free "teases" right before they cut to commercial. Steve Carrell's character in "Bruce Almighty" had a great rip on this phenomenon: "Is your child in grave danger? Details at 11." I don't watch local news at all anymore. Can't stand it.

 

Movie special effects done by people with no understanding of physics and no understanding of the limits of reality. CGI fighter planes with a thrust-to-weight ratio of 5 that can pull 20-g turns. Shotgun blasts that knock the victim clear across the room, but leave the shooter standing tall. Cars that roll over and explode after a 5-MPH collision.

 

Inhibitions. In myself and other people.

 

Having to shave every stinkin' day. Razor & foam gives the best results, but it only lasts for a day, and I can only do that twice a week; any more frequently than that, and my face really hurts. The rest of the time I use an electric, and although it doesn't hurt, my face still feels like 220-grit when I'm done (80-grit by nightfall). Women may argue that shaving daily beats dealing with a period monthly. Does it? Maybe. The world may never know for sure, but Squeeze wrote a song about it called She Doesn't Have to Shave.

 

Being in an interminable meeting while struggling to stay awake.

 

Sports riots. You idiots! IT'S YOUR OWN CITY! Talk about the perfect spot for a row of "dopeslap" emoticons:

 

:dopeslap: :dopeslap: :dopeslap: :dopeslap: :dopeslap: :dopeslap:

 

Wedgies. Oh, the agony.

 

The fact that my Garmin 276, as advanced as is, STILL only lets me label waypoints with a scant ten letters. All caps. WTF, there's not enough memory? Isn't this the sort of thinking that brought us the Y2K fiasco? The waypoint marking the Fountain Flats Drive in Yellowstone National Park gets listed as "YFNTFLATDR". Yeah, that'll click with me when I see it a week later.

 

The wasting of youth on the young.

 

Terseness exhibited by Argentine immigrants.

 

The resampling/redubbing of favorite songs by hip-hop artists. I cringed when Crazy Town corrupted the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Pretty Little Ditty" for their chart-topping "Butterfly." The Onion once had an article about a musician who had sampled an original song in its entirety and made no modifications whatsoever. They had another article titled "Nation's Rappers Down to Last Two Samples."

 

Pedestrians who start to cross the road just as the traffic light's turning yellow. Once when I saw a couple of coeds start across from the left while I was waiting in my car for a green light, I put the car in gear, and when the light turned green, they were still about 6 feet from blocking my path; I revved, let the clutch out, and made the tires scream all the way across the intersection. They were quite startled. Did they learn a lesson? Probably not, but I enjoyed it.

 

High humidity (unless I happen to be just stepping out of a shower).

 

The inexorable march of time - in particular, the half-hour or so after my alarm goes off in the morning. Man, it's hard to get up on time some days. My snooze button's gonna wear out long before the rest of the clock does...

 

The speed with which fresh produce becomes rotten produce. An old roommate and I used to refer to the vegetable crisper drawer in the fridge as the "vegetable rotter."

 

Clerks who hand you your change and/or your purchase without saying a word. Say something, fergodsake, anything to acknowledge the human being standing before you!

 

That one mosquito that gets into your tent before you zip it shut, and enjoys repeatedly landing on your earlobe and then magically dodging your every attempt to kill it.

 

Infomercials. Are there people out there who actually watch the entire half hour show?

 

City buses with low-mounted exhaust systems. It's understood that these buses are supposed to operate in areas with dense, low-speed stop-n-go traffic and lots of pedestrians, so why are they made in such a way that they spew soot-laden exhaust out at knee level instead of 10 feet up? Yuck. Almost as bad as the sticky ketchup packets (except sticky ketchup packets aren't carcinogenic).

 

People who don't wash their hands after using the bathroom; you want to tell them all about Typhoid Mary.

 

Inadequate lubrication.

 

Fran Drescher's voice.

 

Shaggy and Scooby's perpetual lack of situational awareness.

 

Pants that fit great when you buy them, and then shrink when you wash them.

 

The incredible dearth of music videos on MTV.

 

4-horsepower lawn mowers. What the hell was I thinking when I bought that puny thing?

 

Yellowjackets. Last summer, in violation of the Geneva Convention, I employed weapons of mass destruction on my front porch to destroy no less than 18 separate nests created by these venomous little paranoiacs; they love to settle in the little gaps and spaces of the porch railing. Genocide? Yes. I don't care. Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out.

 

Deerflies. Horseflies, you can tell when they land on you, and you can take action before they get out their sharpened spoon and start digging into your flesh. Deerflies are too light; usually the first clue you have is when they dig in. OOOOWWW!

 

Banker's hours.

 

[Jake]

You all know you hate it when this happens:

 

Biting your cheek while chewing something, pain subsides, cheek swells a little bit, you forget about it, THEN YOU BITE THE #@&*%$ THING AGAIN!

[ltljohn]

Ya know what bugs me is people that go on and on and on and complain about everything.

[Hermes]

The only thing that bugs me in my (current) life is that all clocks run way too fast........

 

Francois, that is explained with Einstin's Relativity Theory. If you constantly go (way) too fast with your RT (witnes your recent ticket), then, upon your return you will see that everyone seems older and clocks have moved faster in relation to yours. So, slow down, enjoy the dikes and the windmills, and take some more pictures for posting.

[Rocer]

Reading funny posts late at night (see Mitch's) that make me laugh too loud and too long, waking up my wife resulting in my familiarity with the dog's house.

[Shaman97]

Insurance companies.

 

For our dental insurance, the two companies will "coordinate benefits" to be sure together, they do not pay more than the 80% just to make sure my family pays the 20% (minus deductibles, of course)